beyond nature 83
Daedalus too returned to earth. As we saw, he landed in Sicily and
found refuge from King Minos in the court of King Cocalus of Camicus.
We pick up the thread of this peripatetic inventor’s exploits in the next
chapter.
HUMAN-POWERED FLIGHTThe experiments by Daedalus and Alex-
ander reflect an age- old fascination with
technology’s potentials, envisioned in
early myth, legend, and folklore, to exceed
human boundaries and create artificial
human enhancements. The wish to imi-
tate birds’ exhilarating freedom persists,
leading many others to try to achieve
Daedalus’s feat. In the Greek myth,
Daedalus’s “impossible” human- powered
flight involved simply imitating birds,
by flapping man- made feathered wings
attached to one’s back and arms. Large
kites in the shape of birds’ wings and other
wing- beating flying devices were tested in
China as early as the first century AD. 35
A Chinese text of the fourth century AD
relates that a people of the Far West in-
vented a flying machine driven by wind
and had to make an emergency landing in
Shang dynasty territory (Yellow River val-
ley, ca. 1600– 1046 BC). The Shang ruler
destroyed the machines so that they could
not be copied, but the stranded pilots re-
built them and flew back home. 36
In about 1500, Leonardo da Vinci,
who was familiar with Greek myths, not
only made designs for a diving bell and
suit, but also sketched several plans for
human- powered ornithopters (mechan-
ical wing- flapping devices modeled on
bird and bat wings). There is no evidence
of physical prototypes or test flights for
Leonardo’s plans. But models based on
his drawings have been made, most re-
cently in 2006 by the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London for an exhibit on
early flight.
The glorious notion of flying by
human power alone has inspired nu-
merous intrepid modern inventors to
find ways to overcome the problems
of aerodynamics and power- to- weight
ratio. One clever suggestion was to find
a way to use foot- pedaling energy. Leg-
powered flight was long considered to
be impossible. Aeronautical engineers
believed that no aircraft could be light
enough to fly on such a limited source of
power and yet be robust enough to carry
a pilot— who of course would have to
possess extraordinary strength and en-
durance. One of the first attempts was a
“cycleplane” built in 1923, but it achieved
only twenty- foot hops. In 1977, advances
in strong, lightweight materials resulted
in a human- powered plane flown by a
cyclist- hang- glider pilot, who reached
the modest altitude of ten feet and flew
just over a mile.
It’s diverting to speculate on some
potential practical options that existed in
antiquity for the mythic Daedalus, such
as kites or glider sail- wings. Chinese